Cantata Angeleno - Poetry by Robert Eastwood
Publication Date: May 1, 2021
Paperback, 96 pages
Available from Small Press Distribution
As Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” This is the theme running through Robert Eastwood’s Cantata Angeleno, a composition of many voices all telling of Los Angeles’ tragic racial past and present, of how events long ago still reverberate today.
In the first section, set in the 1940s, he writes of the racism confronting all non-whites at the time: the Japanese, of course, and Blacks, but especially young Mexican-Americans. The sentiment of the time is chillingly familiar:
Keep them in ghettos
if not camps. Build a wall. Build a camp somewhere far.
Ship them home. Don’t let more in.
They bring drugs, disease, rape, & murder!
Beat them down, cage them in, save us
from likes of traitorous THEM!
The central story recounts the injustice of the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial of Mexican-American men accused of killing José Díaz, tried before notoriously racist Judge Charles Fricke, defended by celebrities like Orson Welles, convicted, jailed, ultimately acquitted, but never the same after. Eastwood also writes of the “Zoot-Suit Riots,” of rampaging US Navy sailors attacking young Mexican-American men known for their
distinctive, defiant style of dress; and of the everyday violence inflicted by police.
In the second section, Eastwood imagines descendants of the victims of these injustices, portraying how the consequences of the past shape present lives. Lupe, a niece of one of the Sleepy Lagoon accused, is inspired by learning that he had written poems while imprisoned,
in isolation & unfairness
meant I could write poems, weak & brown
as I am, a person of no consequence, imprisoned
with feelings, & it changed how I saw myself.
More tragically, in the closing poem the son of another of the accused is himself murdered, senselessly, a coda expressing an intergenerational legacy of violence.
Earlier in the book, there is a poem in which the murder victim José Díaz appears, saying
I’m dead & being dead
I reach for words with no tongue,
I vibrate with ghosts.
Robert Eastwood’s cantata vibrates with the voices of all of these ghosts, and he gives them, at last, words and a tongue with which they may speak them to us, imploring us to learn from the past, to make a better future.
Praise for Robert Eastwood's Cantata Angeleno:
One of Robert Eastwood’s many gifts as a poet is his ability to imagine himself into other times, other places, other voices. His Cantata Angeleno, inspired by the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon Case, is very much a cantata, with its solos and chorus of voices, but it also reads like a novel in verse. Throughout, Eastwood skillfully blends the lyric with the vernacular, the actual history with imagined history, giving voice to the voiceless, redeeming the wrongly accused, and acknowledging evil where it does in fact exist. In making the past a mirror of the present, Eastwood offers us a model for leaving no lives, including our own, unexamined.
—Lynne Knight, author of The Language of Forgetting
Making deft use of the devices and forms of music ranging from opera to rap, Cantata Angeleno sings of the horror that is American racism — here against Chicanos during and after Los Angeles’s 1942 Zoot Suit Riots. History rhymes now and again, but hardly ever does it sing. That rarity becomes real in Robert Eastwood's remarkable verses.
—Robert Aquinas McNally, author of The Modoc War
Robert Eastwood has written Cantata Angeleno by starting with the true story of the 1942 Los Angeles murder of José Diaz. Known as the Sleepy Lagoon Murder, it was followed by the trial of a group of maybe innocent Mexican boys. The book, a hybrid, braids lineated fact and fiction with deft lyricism. Various poetic forms appear. A variety of personas. And it all has to do with LA during WWII. This is a book of ambitious, captivating and skillful poetry. Kudos to Eastwood for creating this marvel!
—Susan Terris, author of Familiar Tense
Robert Eastwood has evolved, not just in the biological sense, but in the evolving of his heart and mind. He began a career in business, and although he was relatively successful for thirty-four years, he knew he wanted something else. He dabbled with art, but it was something to do with books. He became a teacher, he taught high-schoolers writing, but found it was the writing itself he wanted to do. At 60, when his four children were out of college, and away, making their own futures, he began to write and publish poems and short stories. Now, after 22 years, when he sees a not too distant horizon, he has published four books of poetry with reputable publishers, he has won prizes and recognition, and enjoys friendships with like-minded poets and writers. Maybe evolution, as Alfred North Whitehead and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin suggested, is ineluctably upward. We are collaborators in creation.